Soup in a jar, or a bowl

The ingredients go into the jar, but the soup, when ready, goes into a bowl. At least for me it does. But maybe next time I’ll try eating it out of the jar, it will make drinking up the last of the broth so much simpler.

Again, my husband’s ideas strike again. Last week it was a plea for more protein in our diets and less carbs. Done. This past week Martin asked if I could put soup in a jar. Now that is just plain funny. No really. You need background on this. Martin, my darling husband (DH) rarely eats soup. So, him asking is kinda funny, but I was up for the challenge.

The idea is to put all the soup ingredients into a jar except for the broth. When you’re ready to eat, pour hot water over the top, let things warm up for a few minutes, and lunch is served. You can pack these jars days ahead and store them in the fridge. Since the noodles aren’t immersed in liquid, they stay chewy and fresh instead of getting soft and waterlogged.

Jar: I started by using the pint-sized wide-mouth canning jar. These hold a large amount of food and they go into the dishwasher for a quick clean up. You can eat straight from the jar or pour your warmed soup into a bowl.

Noodles: I used the quick fry noodles, these boiled in just 1 minute and are low carb. You can use whatever noodles you like. Spaghetti from last night’s dinner, rice noodles, udon noodles or even the ramen noodles from prepackaged noodle packs.

Vegetables: You can use a frozen mix, but I opted for sweet potato (must precook hard vegetables), sliced mushrooms and peppers.

Protein: I love chicken. So I prepared it the same way I do for salads (lightly coated with steak spice, cooked for 22 minutes at 450). But you could add thinly sliced beef, pork or tofu.

Flavour: you must add soup stock paste/or granules. I like the paste since it dissolves in the water easily. Because I was going for a Red Curry, I added a spicy red curry paste and coconut cream too.

Topping: I like thinly sliced green onions, but cilantro would be good too.

NOTE: when you add hot water, it will not cook any of these ingredients, so make sure that anything that needs to be cooked (like chicken/beef/pork or hard vegetables) gets cooked before it goes into the jar.